indigestion. So to settle
This strife eternal,--Betty, bring the kettle!

Coffee! oh, Coffee! Faith, it is surprising.
'Mid all the poets, good, and bad, and worse.
Who've scribbled (Hock or Chian eulogizing)
Post and papyrus with "Immortal verse"--
Melodiously similitudinising
In Sapphics languid or Alcaics terse
No one, my little brown Arabian berry,.
Hath sung thy praises--'tis surprising! very!

Were I a poet now, whose ready rhymes.
Like Tommy Moore's, came tripping to their places--
Reeling along a merry troll of chimes,
With careless truth,--a dance of fuddled Graces;
Hear it--_Gazette_, _Post_, _Herald_, _Standard_, _Times_,
I'd write an epic! Coffee for its basis;
Sweet as e'er warbled forth from cockney throttles
Since Bob Montgomery's or Amos Cottle's.

Thou sleepy-eyed Chinese--enticing siren,
Pekoe! the Muse hath said in praise of thee,
"That cheers but not inebriates"; and Byron
Hath called thy sister "Queen of Tears", Bohea!
And he, Anacreon of Rome's age of iron,
Says, how untruly "_Quis non potius te_."
While coffee, thou--bill-plastered gables say,
Art like old Cupid, "roasted every day."

I love, upon a rainy night, as this is,
When rarely and more rare the coaches rattle
From street to street, to sip thy fragrant kisses;
While from the Strand remote some drunken battle
Far-faintly echoes, and the kettle hisses
Upon the glowing hob. No tittle-tattle
To make a single thought of mine an alien
From thee, my coffee-pot, my fount Castalian.

The many intervening verses cover an unhappy termination to an otherwise
delightful ball. He is sitting with his charming "Mary", about to ask
her to be his bride, when the unfortunate overturning of a glass of red
wine into her white satin gown, at the same time overthrows all his
dreams of bliss, "for the shrew displaces the angel he adored", and he
resigns himself to the life of "a man in chambers."

'Tis thus I sit and sip, and sip and think.
And think and sip again, and dip in _Fraser_,
A health, King Oliver! to thee I drink:
Long may the public have thee to amaze her.
Like _Figaro_, thou makest one's eyelids wink,
Twirling on practised palm thy polished razor--
True Horace temper, smoothed on attic strop;
Ah! thou couldst "_faire la barbe a tout l'Europe_."

* * * * *

Come, Oliver, and tell us what the news is;
An easy chair awaits thee--come and fill 't.
Come, I invoke thee, as they do the muses,
And thou sh